Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics at the Barbican Art Gallery

At times as freewheeling and overwhelming in its structure as Schneemann’s own work, Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics requires stamina. Made up of 12 sections meandering between a chronological and thematic organisation, and stretching across both floors of the Barbican Centre’s gallery space, the exhibition does not accommodate gentle drifting. However, if one is willing to chew on each morsel on display – ranging from performance documentation, photography and film to sculptural assemblages, sketches, installations and ephemera – the exhibition is gratifying in its comprehensive survey of Schneemann’s exuberant artistic vision.

Body Politics begins with her early forays into painting and assemblage, which synthesise a Post-Impressionist approach to colour and movement with a Pop sensibility. While these pieces do not possess the transformative spirit of Schneemann’s more mature work, it is interesting to identify the early presence of the frenetic physicality and inversion of visual power structures that would come to define her later installations, films and performances.

It is in the fourth section, in which Eye Body: 36 Transformations Actions for Camera is displayed, that we see the artist coming into her own. In the prints documenting this 1963 performance, we watch as she fuses “image” and “image maker”, refusing to conform to the entrenched, often gendered dichotomy of object and subject that the two positions are associated with. In this work, as in Meat Joy (1964), Interior Scroll (1975) and Up to and Including Her Limits (1976), Schneemann uses her body as an intelligent, generative art instrument whilst interrogating the symbolic implications of the nude female form. She performs her own physicality variously as messy, ugly, sacred, erotic, creative, subjugated; she is at once thing of beauty, agent of desire, object of disgust.

This experimentation with the multivalence of the female body as both physical reality and cultural construction is a compelling throughline of the exhibition, and is explicitly spelled out in section 11. It is here that the many moving parts of Schneemann’s energetic artistic thinking begin to outstrip the exhibition format, as vitrines seem to multiply and the sheer volume of photographs, documents and other works makes them difficult to process. The rooms housing single installations or video works feel like respite, despite their difficult content: Mortal Coils is a meditation on personal loss, while Viet-Flakes and Devour approach military violence and the complexities of its refraction through media channels.

Despite the unmanageable quantity of work on display and the occasional overdetermination of the political efficacy of some pieces (More Wrong Things feels more like rubbernecking than empathising with the victims of 9/11), Body Politics is an important landmark in the ongoing appreciation of Schneemann’s impact on feminist thought and visual culture.